I am going to make a harvest hop IPA and am considering this method. The recipe I have was extract, and they said to make a hop tea with some of the green hops and your steeping grains. So I plan to use the wet hops in the mash. Anyone else doing this? Any favored methods? Have hops in tun, add strike water, dough in? Strike water, partial dough, add hops, finish dough? Hops on top after dough in?

I came across this thread after reading an article about must try hoppy beers. I was surprised how many of the beers listed did a mash hop, including one of my recent favorites, Ace of Spades-

Quote:

3. Hopworks Organic Ace of Spades Ė Winning a gold medal at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival isnít the only reason to try this phenomenal Imperial IPA from Portlandís Hopworks Urban Brewery, but it should be some indication to you just how killer it truly is. The annually released beast, available in 22-ounce bottles and on tap, serves up a boisterous 9.5% ABV and 100 IBU. A tribute to Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, the beer rocks equally as hard. Ace prominently features Amarillo, Cascade and Centennial hops, which the brewery say is added at every point of the brewing process: mash tun, first wort, kettle, and dry hop. All of the hoppy green goodness results in a beer with a huge citrus hop aroma, flavor and deep, clean bitterness. One of the finest hoppy treasures of all time, but donít take our word for it, go snag yourself one when you can.

My friend at FatHead's in Cleveland gave me an IPA that they made with an experimental hop that they added at every point in production--mash, FWH, kettle, fermentation, and dry. Since they were added everywhere, I have no idea of the specific contribution of that one addition, but I was intrigued by the concept.

With this speculation of mash hopping has anyone made mash hop the only addition using 100% base malt to see the impact that it gives? If you do a 90+min boil you will see what is truely driven off or retained in the kettle. Like others have said I can see this working well with decoction mashes, then again the low temp/pH does catch my attention. Reading a BYO on Serria Nevadas Torpedo they state that after boil they wait till the wort is 180F before their Torpedo addition that sits for about 4 hours. At these low temps you get more flavor and aroma. Kind of on the far opposite side of mash hopping but I think it touches on the lower temperature side of hop usage.

I mash hopped, first-wort hopped, and bittered with the same, small amount of Columbus for a 120 IBU IPA. But I did not discriminate on the late aroma hops. I definitely added a bunch of those like always.

End result: It was smoother than my previous 60-90 IBU IPAs that were simply bittered or simply FWH'd. I did not think it lent anything to the aroma though... just the overall smoothness of the IPA.

Does anyone have some hard-fast numbers on how long at what temp range it takes to achieve this sort of hop profile (mash hopping)? Ie. if I FWH but do a very slow runoff of second (and possibly third) runnings, the hops could spend upwards of 30-45 minutes at temps in the 150's before heating up to a boil. I'm guessing this would change the profile versus a "typical" FWH which only spends 10-15 minutes in that temp range while heating up to boil, right?

Isomerization of alpha acids is not occuring below 175-180 F, whether you're mash hopping or first wort hopping. When you exceed 180 F, you are beginning to extract bitterness via alpha acid isomerization.

*Mash hops are usually added at mash temps, e.g. 145-160 F
*FWH are usually first added at sparge temps and greater (but lower than a full rolling boil), e.g. 170-185 F
*Traditional boil hops are usually first added as soon as the wort reaches a full rolling boil, e.g. 208-212 F

For a multitude of individual brewing reasons that I don't really want to start a debate over, I am a firm believer in the last method for all American IIPAs and most American IPAs and hop heavy styles. Though, it is fine by me to Mash Hop or FWH plenty of other beer styles.